There seems to be some confusion about configuring cardbus and PCMCIA cards on this laptop, and especially wireless cards. At least I was confused after reading through about 50 forum topics about it!

The confusion includes:

* Whether to use pcmcia-cs or not.
* What PCIC driver to use.
* How to configure it all.
* For the wireless card, how to get it to work at all!

This note documents how to get this particular configuration working. The information may be useful for other configurations, but no promises.

First, kernel configuration: contrary to what a number of forum topics suggest, the "pcmcia-cs" package does not include any drivers. The "pcmcia-cs-drivers" package which does contain drivers is currently hard-masked. This lead me to use the kernel-supplied drivers mostly. Also, this laptop has a TI1225 PCIC and the i82365 driver in 2.4.20 does not work with it, even though the one on the 1.4RC4 livecd does! You want the yenta_socket driver for this laptop. So, the kernel configuration I successfully use (neglecting all other configuration) is:

* General Setup > PCMCIA/CardBus support as a module.
* General Setup > PCMCIA/CardBus support > CardBus support enabled, and no other drivers selected.
* Network device support > Wireless LAN (non-hamradio) enabled and no other drivers selected.

Then build and install your kernel and modules, as documented elsewhere.

You need the "pcmcia-cs" and "hotplug" packages to do the necessary configuration when the wireless card is inserted. After installing them, use your favorite editor on /etc/conf.d/pcmcia and specify "yenta_socket" for your PCIC driver:

Code:

# These are from the pcmcia-cs distribution, but aren't used yet
# Should be either i82365 or tcic
#PCIC="i82365 tcic"
PCIC="yenta_socket"

Be sure that the pcmcia service is started at boot time:

Code:

rc-update add pcmcia default

For a laptop, you probably do not want net.eth0 automatically started, since the pcmcia-cs system will start the network for you when you insert a network card.

The orinoco_cs website also suggests that the "hermes.conf" file gotten from that website should be placed in /etc/pcmcia, so download it and put it there.

You should also do the necessary configuration in /etc/pcmcia/wireless.conf.

Finally, if necessary, reboot, insert your card, and you should be up and running.